Netanyahu Must Make Hard Choices

Over the past two decades, voters in Israel's national elections have wavered anxiously between their desperate need for security and their deep desire for meaningful peace with their Arab neighbors.

This time, the sharply divided electorate appears to have chosen security over peace by the slimmest of margins.

Nearly 80 percent of eligible Israeli voters went to the polls Wednesday and elected Benjamin Netanyahu of the conservative Likud coalition over Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres by less than a single percentage point.

The 46-year-old Netanyahu's campaign played to the fears and insecurities of many Israelis while giving encouragement to proponents of a much harder line against Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. His cause was aided by a rash of terrorist bombings and a growing apprehension that Israel had sacrificed too much safety by granting self-rule to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish assassin last November only deepened the national anguish.

Netanyahu has vowed not to permit the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, to give the Israeli military free rein to hunt down Islamic terrorists, to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank and never to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria or one square inch of Jerusalem to Arab control.

If he is determined to transform campaign rhetoric into reality and to install such hawks as ex-generals Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan in key policy roles, he could bring a screeching halt to the Mideast peace process that was launched in Oslo in 1993 and kept on track by Rabin and Peres.

The great imponderable hanging over the emerging Netanyahu government is whether it will be pulled to the right by its more extreme nationalist and religious elements or drawn toward the center by the fragility of its mandate and international economic and political pressure.

If history is a guide, the evolution of Netanyahu's predecessor Menachem Begin might be instructive. Begin and Likud scored a stunning upset in the late 1970s by running on promises not unlike today's. But it was Begin who made peace with Egypt's Anwar Sadat, surrendered the Sinai peninsula and abandoned the showcase settlement of Yamit.

Ideologue or pragmatist? The choice is Netanyahu's and the consequences of his decision will resonate far beyond the Middle East.